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Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.~
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.
- Rumi
I want to tell you a personal story.
A story about high stakes decision-making.
A story about opening to impulse and wanting.
A story about inner knowing, body intelligence, and integrity.
And a story about how to handle it when integrity and aliveness points us in a direction that challenges our very sense of who we are.
What I mean when I say Integrity
This is a story about Integrity.
Before I begin, I want to take a moment to explain what I mean when I say integrity.
In recent years, I’ve been smitten with the Conscious Leadership Group’s definition of integrity (as I have been by much of what they do, if you haven’t noticed).
The Conscious Leadership group defines integrity first and foremost as energetic wholeness. To be in integrity is to be in a felt sense of energetic wholeness with yourself.
They go on to say that integrity involves three core aspects:
First, Energy Management. This isn’t your typical energy management around stress and rest cycles. In this context, they mean energy flow, or allowing for the flow of your life force and energy. In this context, anything which involves damming up the flow of life force in you is considered any integrity breach. Any way that you withhold and resist what is inside of you, is an integrity breach.
Second, Congruence. This means matching what is on the outside to what is on the inside. To be incongruent, to block up or alter what’s happening on the inside from coming out, is another way that we leak energy and come out of integrity.
Finally, Alignment. To be aligned is to be on purpose. It means you know what you’re up to out in the world. You’re intentional about how you want to move through the world and what you want to be creating, and you’re aligned with that. Another way to be out of integrity is to either not be clear on your purpose, or to not align with it when you are clear.
So Integrity, or Energetic Wholeness, means we are allowing for the full flow of our energy and aliveness, congruently expressing that which is inside of us, and operating in alignment and devotion to self-authored purpose. Furthermore, there are four pillars which we look at in honoring that:
Taking 100% Responsibility
Speaking Candidly
Feeling our Feelings
Keeping our Agreements
You might be asking yourself, how are these connected?
I invite you to feel into this.
How do you feel when you notice that you’re not taking responsibility for something that you care about? How about when you’re withholding a truth of yours? When you suppress a feeling? Or when you’ve broken an agreement and haven’t yet cleaned it up?
For me, I notice every one of these involves my energy going down.
Blaming or abdicating responsibility? Energy drain.
Withholding my truth? Energy drain.
Suppressing an emotion? Energy leaking faster than I can believe.
Holding an unclear agreement? Energy lost and focus drifting.
There’s a tightness to self (in the good sense of the word) that I can feel when I’m 100% in responsibility, candor, feeling feelings, and keeping impeccable agreements. There’s a huge flow of aliveness. Which, frankly, is what all of this conceptualization is pointing to.
All of these concepts are pointing to an embodied experience of integrity. That experience is grounded. Firm. Convicted. Clear. Alive. There’s power and clarity in it. There’s assuredness. There’s a sense of standing strong and firm as opposed to wishy-washy and easily knocked about.
Jim Dethmer described it as feeling the gears locking in as someone speaks. There’s a certain ineffable but felt quality of “yes, that is what is undeniably true and alive for this person.” There is a sense that you can really feel them and trust that they are in touch with themself.
For me, that feeling is delicious.
So once again, with all of that context.
This is a story about Integrity.
Completing Two Steps before the Finish Line
It was the second day of the final retreat of my year long training with the Conscious Leadership Group.
Two days left until the end of the program.
363 days completed. Two out of 365 left.
99.4% of the way to the finish line.
And I decided I was done.
I didn’t know what this would mean—if I would be certified, if I’d be able to stay connected with the group in an official capacity.
But I knew what was true for me.
I was done.
Getting to Complete
The retreat had mostly gone swimmingly for me. Day one was everything I wanted. Deeply connected. Revealed & Seen. A specific exercise that hit exactly what I said I wanted out of the retreat.
Day two felt somehow different to me, without me even noticing it. I was pulled back. Not fully there.
In the afternoon, before starting an exercise, my mentor Jim Fallon called me out: “Justin, you’re hiding.”
It hit me in my body like a zap of lightning. I held it in my consciousness long enough to see it, “shit, he’s right.”
“Thank you.”
I sat there, simmering in the truth of it. Simmering in the question: now that I see it, am I willing to come out?
After we completed the exercise, I sprang up and went straight to Jim: “Can I get your support?”
I experienced what unfolded from that simple question as if I were in a time dilation— it still simultaneously feels like it was just a few seconds and many years.
Jim and I sat by a firepit outside. I don’t remember the exact details, but the conversation went something like this:
Me: “I see what you’re saying about me hiding and I don’t know if I’m willing to shift it. But I know I want to poke at it. It feels like a loose tooth: maybe ready to come out, maybe not.”
Jim: “Okay.”
Me: “It’s hiding. It’s like this.”
I gave myself a minute to physically embody hiding—to withdraw into myself, tuck my chest and head into my legs. It was tense—tight—exhausting.
Me: “God this is exhausting. I want to be done with this.”
Jim: “God this is exhausting. I want to be done with this.”
Boom. Something opened inside of me and reverberated like a clap of thunder.
I was done.
Done here. Done there. Done everywhere.
So many places in my life where I was done with what was there. I had either got everything I wanted or I was ready for it to change.
So many places in my life where I was waiting for permission, a sign, or somebody else’s demarcation of done to actually be done.
I contracted around the impulse. I tried to push it away.
It was insane for me to want this! Insane for me to even consider leaving now! Two days before the finish line? Countless hours and thousands of dollars invested, all for me to leave 99% of the way through?!
I wanted to hide from my realization, but I mustered the courage to out myself: “I think I’m done here. I’m not ready to commit yet, but I think I’m done with the program.”
In that moment, Jim gave me a beautiful gift: he invited me to take my wanting for a walk. To try on staying, then try on leaving, and see how it felt in my body without getting too much into my head.
I agreed, and about 30 seconds into my walk it dawned on me: “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I’m going to leave.”
The want had taken root and was working it’s way through my system. It was sending my head and stories about myself for a ride.
“I work hard! I persevere through discomfort! I see things through to the very end!”
“What will my wife think?! My parents?! Will I even be certified?! This is insane!!!!”
“You’re two days away from the finish line! This makes absolutely no sense!”
But in that moment, I already knew. My body was so clear on my wanting. My heart felt joy, excitement, and pulses of sadness and fear when I considered completing and claiming my own choice. And my head knew a few simple facts: that I could figure out how to leave early and get home.
I got back from my walk shortly before the next activity and called Jim over.
“I really think I’m ready to go.”
“So you’re decided?”
“Yes.”
“Amazing!!!! Let’s go complete with the group!!!”
I did, and what I felt, in every cell of my being, was euphoria, spaciousness, beauty, connection, and most importantly: Integrity.
Opening to Wanting
Denial of Impulse
One of the conversations I had at the retreat was with fellow coach and breathwork facilitator George Ramsay. George was playing around with a radical idea:
Lately, I’ve been playing around with the idea that all of the complexity and drama in our lives comes from one source — denying an impulse.
The idea that George presented was that whenever things start to feel complicated, whenever you find yourself in a complex situation that you need to “figure out”, you can always trace it back to the denial of an initial impulse.
You said yes when you were really a no.
There was an internal wiggle—something telling you that this isn’t quite right—that you ignored.
There’s something else you’re wanting that you deny. You settle instead.
So much drama, confusion, and complexity all because we are unconscious to, avoid, ignore, or override those intelligent impulses that our body sends us.
I find this idea profound and so so applicable. We so frequently override our impulses and wanting, despite those things being the very pointers to that which we most deeply want and long for in life.
That initial movement toward aliveness for me was precisely that—an impulse, flashing before me. An impulse that I immediately constricted around and frightened myself with. An impulse I could’ve easily denied. And an impulse I was fortunate to have support in facing.
Wanting what you Want as much as you want it
That support was in a fundamental but simple skill, that of allowing for wanting.
I’ll never forgot a moment of coaching Jim Dethmer gave the group at the first retreat, where he asked: Would you be willing to want what you want, just as much as you want it?
You might be laughing to yourself. It’s a stupidly simple question.
And yet… do you? Would you?
So often we don’t.
We scare ourselves with our impulses, with our wanting. And in that fear—that fear which so frequently arises from an identity challenged—we write off the wanting.
We throw it out.
Run away from it.
Erase the possibility.
And the accumulation of that practice, over and over, is a life that is deeply out of integrity, a life distant from everything we want and a sense of confusion around how we got there.
And so the first and primary skill is simply this: allowing for yourself to want what you want, just as much as you want it.
To take a stand for the possibility of your wanting.
And to face and confront the inner tension which that wanting arouses in you.
When Inner Knowing challenges Identity
In the crucible of transformation, the confrontation of inner knowing with pre-existing identities is a surefire bet.
For me, the inner impulse to be complete early and on my own terms confronted a deeply entrenched identity— the one in me who efforts, tries hard, gives it their all, commits, and persists.
This identification with giving it my all and seeing things through was so profoundly deep that challenging it brought up the entire array of core fears: fear of abandonment, loss of love, loss of security, loss of control.
The identity clung to me as I did it, both of us equally terrified. I’d lived this identity so long that I had no clue how things would unfold if I didn’t.
If I was wanting to go, why was I so frightened? Was the fear telling me to move forward or that this was a mistake? How am I to interpret these signals as they happen?
Jim gave me such a gift in that moment. In inviting me to take my wanting for a walk, he was also inviting me into what I’ve found to be the essential skill in these moments: Slowing down.
In that moment I was afraid, yes. But that fear arose from an identity that my inner knowing was willing to challenge and shed. And, as a result, that identity was at threat.
The fear wasn’t saying stop. Nor was the answer to override. The fear was saying “slow down and be with what is happening inside of you”.
Inviting me to take my impulse for a walk was the greatest gift that Jim could have given me. I saw so clearly that dance that was happening internally:
My gut instinct, or body intelligence, found the decision to complete early and leave delicious. I wanted it. When I tapped purely into instinct, I was a whole body yes to completing. Not one cell in me wanted to stay.
My emotional intelligence felt joy, excitement, sadness, and fear around deciding to leave. Joy and excitement for pursuing what I wanted, sadness around leaving the people I’d come to be so connected to, and fear around what this all meant. A fear that didn’t say “don’t do this”, but merely said “pay attention, something important is happening.”
It was my head where things were going awry. In my head my old identity was screaming stories and seductively wanting me to believe them — “what will your wife think? Your parents?! Not good things! And what if you don’t get the certification? Are you crazy! It’s only two more days, you HAVE to see it through!”
Herein lies the difference between head intelligence and our identities. Clean head intelligence knows that all of those concerns are stories, not facts. They were possibilities that could be influenced. Identity is that which believes those stories. Hell, it was built around those stories! That I commit, effort, persist in order to earn love, approval, security, control, and to go against that would be to lose all of those things.
This is where the experience of the decision “making no sense” came from. Of course if I believe those beliefs it makes no sense! The moment I loosen my grip on them, a whole new world opens up. Clean head intelligence sees the truth: I had no idea how things would unfold.
In slowing down and being with all that is happening in crucible moments, we can arrive to the real question at the heart of a decision.
It’s not yes or no, but instead: what will I need to be willing to risk to live out my want?
For me, it was the possibility of disapproval and not being certified.
And I decided I was willing to risk it.
It’s not that this was the “right” decision. But it was the real decision to be made.
Not whether to stay or go. But whether I was willing to risk what the identity was attached to in the name of my integrity and aliveness.
In slowing down to get that deep, I had the chance to learn something new about myself.
A New way of Relating to Decisions
What this is all pointing to is a fundamentally different way to think about decisions.
What if there were no right or wrong answers?
What if every decision was primarily a means to learn about yourself?
Your wanting. Your fears. Your resistances. Your fortitude.
What if we could take every decision out to a land beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing and hold it, in relationship to ourself, with curiosity and wonder?
It’s a profound and radical stance.
Suddenly a decision isn’t about a decision. And it’s not about driving to a decision point.
It’s about being present in this and every moment of the decision-making process.
What am I wanting now? What am I feeling and thinking now? And what is the next step of my exploration and discovery of the unfolding?
There is spaciousness, freedom. The game is no longer about right and wrong but about discovery and exploration.
In that discovery and exploration there are likely going to be many things: joy, excitement, fear, heartbreak, frustration, resistance. And the game becomes to stay present and curious with those every step of the way.
In moving toward the decision. In executing the decision. And in integrating the decision.
It is all an invitation to presence. To curiosity. And to learning.
For me, there were so many ways that moment could’ve unfolded.
I could’ve began announcing my decision to the group and had an experience that led me to turn it around and stay. I could’ve left and felt regret and heartbreak. I could’ve gotten home and experienced something else entirely.
It would be tempting to use different outcomes to label the decision as bad or wrong. But out in that field — I can hold it all as more information about myself and the world.
For me, integrating the decision meant looking at the broader pattern—where else am I hiding from my truth? Where else am I enduring or persisting despite being internally complete?
The aliveness I discovered in that decision, the aliveness in following inner knowing that defied my identities and stories, pointed me to the reality that I was living this pattern all over the place.
Since then, I’ve been manifesting completions wherever I can. Completing that which wants to be completed.
Shifting that which wants to be shifted.
All while holding open the aperture for impulse, wanting, and inner knowing.
A Great Wagon
Which leads me back to Rumi.
There is a land beyond right and wrong, where decisions become something fundamentally different. They become about yearning, about longing, about our heart’s, body’s, and soul’s deepest wants. When we open to those wants truly, fully, it is nearly impossible to go back to sleep.
This essay is, for me, for you, for us all, an invitation to continuously wake up. To your deepest wanting. To what’s truly here for you. To want that wanting as deeply as you want it. And in that wanting uncover new aspects of yourself which are beyond the field of wrongdoing and rightdoing, in the field of your being’s deepest calling.
Below, I’ve included Rumi’s entire poem, titled “A Great Wagon”.
While the original quote is what is most commonly referenced, I find that the poem, in it’s entire context, conveys so much more.
When I see your face, the stones start spinning!
You appear; all studying wanders.
I lose my place.
Water turns pearly.
Fire dies down and doesn’t destroy.
In your presence I don’t want what I thought
I wanted, those three little hanging lamps.
Inside your face the ancient manuscripts
Seem like rusty mirrors.
You breathe; new shapes appear,
and the music of a desire as widespread
as Spring begins to move
like a great wagon.
Drive slowly.
Some of us walking alongside
are lame!
~
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
~
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.
~
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.
~
I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.
Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let’s buy it.
~
Daylight, full of small dancing particles
and the one great turning, our souls
are dancing with you, without feet, they dance.
Can you see them when I whisper in your ear?
~
They try to say what you are, spiritual or sexual?
They wonder about Solomon and all his wives.
In the body of the world, they say, there is a soul
and you are that.
But we have ways within each other
that will never be said by anyone.
~
Come to the orchard in Spring.
There is light and wine, and sweethearts
in the pomegranate flowers.
If you do not come, these do not matter.
If you do come, these do not matter.
P.S.
I was recently interviewed by Gabe Crane and Rahul Deedwania on their podcast Woven Wings Live. We explored decision-making through the lens of a recent personal experience in which my inner knowing clashed with the identities and stories that I held about myself.
We discussed things like:
What is integrity and how do we know when we’re in it?
What role do sensations and signals in our body play in creating our sense of inner knowing?
What do we do when that integrity directs us in a way that makes no sense to us, and is counter to our stated values and internal stories?
How do we navigate that tension and come out feeling whole?
This writing was a result of the clarity I got from being in process with Gabe and Rahul. I hope you enjoy it, and consider listening on your favorite platform:
Apple
Spotify
Resonating with a lot of this, Justin. Great piece. I've been playing around with a lot of this is my own life lately and thinking about intuition, inner guidance, inner knowing, inner compass, Self beyond the thinking mind, etc. Sounds like your body/inner knowing knew what you needed to do but the stories clashed with it, and you had the bravery to understand those stories and trust your intuition. Also loving this idea that the more we do things that are out of alignment with the inner guidance / deeper knowing, the more debt we build up in our bodies and our lives. Lot of jargon in this comment but I bet you'll know what I mean :)
Brilliant, Justin. I love how you listened to your body instead of your head, even with so much on the line. Great courage! I can relate to all of this, and my friend turned me on to The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, a superb book. Thank you.